At least the screen looks decent with piano keys.Windows 8 is so ugly, so so ugly.It's so pathetic.It's so washed out pastel.It's so retarded.It's so dumbed down and borked.It' so ugly, I didn't mention how fugly it is.What a disaster of idiocy.Reply

There's something to be said about the confusion of having so many devices. This is like Windows laptops, even Android tablet lineups are easier to understand.

This is only one manufacturer and with another 5 or so big OEMs it gets very confusing for most consumers. I hope there is some attempt to help compare similar products between OEMs and make it easy to understand which is for you. Atom, ARM, i5, 1080p/IPS, battery docks, premium build etc.

Otherwise my Mom would be more likely to go get an iPad because it will be the same as the iPad everyone else has.Reply

Hey, as of today, when you consider color, capacities, and cell providers, there are 51 different iPad models in the US alone!

Personally, I'm glad for the variety, because it lets Asus address users with different desires. The 13" Transformer Book looks awesome to me, but I'm sure the 13" tablet seems insane to a lot of people. For those people, there are the 11.6" models.

Simplicity is only a good thing if you have very mainstream desires. If you want something a bit more niche, like the 13" Transformer Book, you appreciate companies like Asus that offer a variety of choices.Reply

It's a point that's been made before, and on a superficial level it makes sense. But when you think about consumer electronics there have always been lots of manufacturers and they've all had wide lineups. Think about audio/video equipment going back decades. Stereos, record players, cassette players, CD players,A/V receivers, televisions - they've all had advances, broad lineups, incompatible technologies, dead ends, and yet people bought them and not just 'whatever everyone else had. Consumers were able to make sense of the lineups somehow.

Maybe with computers and now portable devices it's confusing for some consumers - but I would say that goes for older consumers, maybe 40+, who didn't see computing technology evolve until they were a bit older. Young people today are very tech savvy and able to parse the lineups with no more research than people used to do for A/V equipment. There are of course those who are not inclined technically inclined or willing to research but that's what their tech savvy friends are for.Reply

I was thinking about this last night and it occurred to me that this is actually a reasonable approach for a company with the design chops and capacity of ASUS. There's a certain mystery behind who will win the balance of performance, form factor and battery life. So putting all your chips on red is way too risky, even Microsoft is hearing this by releasing Surface RT and Surface Pro.

Now, in three years, once Windows 8's successor has arrived, if we're still looking at multiple SoC types, multiple form factors, and no clear superior option, then we'll know there's a big problem. Reply

The idea is that your mum wouldn't need to worry wether it's i5 or i7. These are mechanically different designs, so they will actually feel different. Once you decided which one you want, the choice is narrowed down considerably. Best would probably be to try them out in a shop personally.Reply

Yea, I am totally confused. Dont even know much about the various ARM processers, much less all the tablets available. Not to mention WinRT and what you can do with that. So now you have Android, WinRT, and Win8, not to mention conventional laptops with or without touchscreens, tablets, tablets plus docks, and laptops that fold over like the Levano yoga.

Personally, I would probably go with Win8 in some form, even if it is a bit slow (atom) or uses more power (Ivy). My experiences with a Acer A100 and android have been mixed at best. Still seems buggy and really slow, kind of like the old computer I once had running Win ME on a 450mhz celeron with 2mb integrated graphics. The best course might be to wait a year or two for Haswell and maybe something from AMD (???) and let the market sort itself out.Reply

Consumer choice is never a problem. Buy what you like. Android gets into trouble because the different options don't have the same version of Android and even with tablets that have uniform versions of Android there are UI customizations that make them look and operate differently.

This will be a minor issue with Windows as there will be Windows RT tablets and Windows 8 tablets. The real difference between these being the ability to run x86 apps. So long as Microsoft and retailers/etailers do a good job of educating consumers this shouldn't be a problem. It certainly won't be nearly as big of a problem as it is on Android.Reply

Bullhockey. It's only complicated for the dweebs who sit around musing the horrors of not knowing all the differences. People actually buy a device and use it, and when they do that, all the horrors you speak of with differences don't matter one whit. Not just you, it's a common theme here, for the membrains, the retarded, the failing critics, the comedy of fraud the whiners pull.

Clearly not one of them mentioned a single thing they like about this or that version, because they haven't got a freaking clue, they haven't used a single device let alone two that are not exactly the same. If they have, it still proves almost complete brain death, as no ins or outs are shared. Another faux nightmare brought to you by the "cool critics without a clue".Reply

So the touch enabled Zenbook really felt that natural to use? I'm surprised, I've never felt it was natural to reach out and touch my display when using my Transformer docked, I only did it when I had no mouse (mostly because the touchpad is pretty mediocre and Android is obviously evenlmore touch centric). I guess if it's no more than a $150 bump over the regular model then it's a worthy experiment...

I think if I pony up $1,000+ for any kind of 13"+ device it's because I want a high res display for serious desktop workloads, I might as well just accompany it with something like a cheap Nexus 7 than try to awkwardly shoehorn it into a tablet usage model. Too many of these devices seem like jack of all trades wannabes...

I guess they're either banking on upselling anyone who ever bought a netbook (with many of the <11"hybrid devices) or hoping people buy into pairing the smaller devices with external displays when they need to work for hours? That's the only scenarios where I see one of those devices being better than a separate laptop and a tablet, at least for people who use a laptop as their main work station.Reply

I guess I would look at it just the opposite way. I have a 7 inch Acer A100, and find it almost useless for anything more than web browsing, and even for that it is very slow, locks up, and the touch interface is very inconsistent. Sometimes you can touch something you want to and it will not register the touch, and other times you can barely touch something by accident and it thinks it is a command. So if I had a nice ultrabook, I probably would have no desire for a tablet.

I really hate Android, at least on this device. Slow, buggy, poor wi-fi and no 3G or 4G. Just a very limited device. I only bought it to check e-mail when at a different lab than the one I normally work in, but it barely picks up the wi-fi signal even for that, while a regular laptop has a very strong signal in the same lab. I only paid 200.00 for it on close out, so for that price, I can deal with it. But if I had paid 400.00 or more for it like some tablets, I would be furious. Reply

Low-end hardware performans worse than the high-end hardware, even if both are using Android. Take me, I bought a cheap Huawei U8800 for 200$ while my girlfriend bought the Samsung Galaxy SII for 700$ (yeah, it was that expensive here in Norway). My phone locks up once in a while, is slow, the touch is unresponsive now and then and all that. Her's never do that. Why? The better hardware.

In other words, your complaints isn't about android, but on products with anemic hardware matched to a more demanding OS or software. The reason Apple has a good reputation is among other things that they don't release mismatched hardware/software.

From a review of the A100: "Like so many other tablets on the market, the A100 packs a 1GHz Tegra 2 processor. In general, we think the SoC has performance limitations, with some visible lags being fairly typical. "Reply

Is the VivoBook ARM, Atom or IVB? Does it support touch?What are the resolutions on the devices? I see you specified it only on the Transformer Book and the AIO.Do any of the tablets (and especially the Transformer Book) have a digitizer, and what kind? A pen silo?Do any of themy have an option for 3G, GPS, accelerometer?Does the Transformer have an additional battery in the keyboard dock? Is there an option for a backlit keyboard?What are the weights?Reply